


o happy daggers i have hidden

by Zannolin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Dissociation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kindness, Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, No beta we die like Gertrude's assistants, Pre-Canon, and i can't give that to him but i can explore some happier moments, and i know most of you are waiting on block men fic so im SORRY, copious amounts of prose, gerry deserves happiness, gerry keay makes me emotional, i have been through three separate fandoms since starting this, i worked on this monster for seven months, pet death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:35:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28581345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zannolin/pseuds/Zannolin
Summary: Mum is not nice or kind or gentle, and Gerry sits hunched in his window, runs his fingers across the faded ink of those four, insignificant, earth-shaking letters, and he decides thathe will be.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	o happy daggers i have hidden

**Author's Note:**

> hhhhhELLO MAGNUS ARCHIVES FANDOM! It has been almost seven months since you last saw me and since then I have most unfortunately been snared by the block men, the one, the only, goddamn minecraft youtube! but I love Gerry so much still and despite my distaste of season 5 thus far, I wanted to finish this fic, if only for some kinda closure. I'm unsure if I'll be creating any more fics for TMA, but I've been working on this one for nearly seven full months, since posting the last one, and while it's not quite up to my current standards and style, it was an important step in me getting my writing to where it is today. So happy 2021, please enjoy my emotions regarding Gerry's entire existence.

**kind (adj):** _of a forbearing nature_ : GENTLE

* * *

He’s not sure what first drives him to pick up the old dictionary. It has sat on the mantle, battered and dusty and buried beneath dozens of other books, a relic unchanged among ever-shifting sands, for as long as Gerard Keay’s short memory can recall. It has probably been here since before he was born. It looks worn enough, which makes him wonder if Mum had gotten it secondhand.

She doesn’t seem like the type to make much use of a dictionary.

(Curious, how contradictory life is. The moon is always out, north isn’t always north, and bats aren’t even blind. A woman can own a bookshop, but never care for most of the books she purveys. A boy can live in a bookshop and hardly crack a cover.)

(A woman can bear a child but not be a mother in any sense at all.)

Contradictory indeed that Gerry prefers not to read — he can’t trust books anymore, he’s found, not when some can turn you inside out or eat you or turn you into a monster — and yet finds himself settled on his frayed window seat with a dictionary spread open across his lap in the grey afternoon light.

It’s probably boredom. When you live in a bookshop but don’t like to read, you find yourself at a loss for things to do most of the time. It can get frightfully boring.

But Gerry prefers the boredom. Welcomes it, even. Boredom is safe. It’s far better than going with Mum when she leaves for her all-too-frequent trips in search of her beloved Leitners. She doesn’t take him often, and for that he’s grateful — sometimes the very thought of having to go with her _anywhere_ sends him into a dizzying spiral, choking on sobs and terror and trying to be silent in the darkness of his closet, hair tangled so tightly round shaking fingers that they’ve gone numb from lack of circulation.

No, a little mundanity is far better than some of the beings lurking out in the world.

So maybe it’s boredom that brings him to reading a dictionary, or maybe it’s that Gerry could never see his mum reading it, and he simply wants to be _un_ like her, somehow. He doesn’t know how to be different, but he does know that he doesn’t want to become a person like Mary Keay.

Either way, Gerry Keay, aged nine and two months, is reading a dictionary because it is the only book he thinks he can trust in the entirety of Pinhole Books. Maybe in all of the world.

* * *

This is how he learns to find himself:

There are far too many words in a dictionary for any one person to read, especially not all at once and certainly not by a person who doesn’t even care to read. But there is a single book in every library to answer the question in a person’s soul, and the same can be said for the words in a dictionary. Among thousands of tiny letters stamped onto pages thin as an old woman’s breath, tucked away between other, more whimsical words ( _gloaming_ and _wanderlust_ and _tintinnabulation; imbue, shimmer, enchant_ —) there is a single word which a young boy reads and is shaken to his core.

Four letters only, and everyday as tea and biscuits, as the noises of traffic on the streets below — but that is enough to open up a universe within Gerry’s chest.

_Kind._

* * *

Kindness, the more he thinks about it, is the opposite of his mother. Mum is harsh words and fingernails digging into your arm and pointed glares. She’s edges and shadows and a vicious, unending hunger for glory and the Ozymandius of a twisted legacy she has erected in her mind. There is nothing about Mary Keay that can be described as _kind_ , and that is almost a relief to Gerry, because if she was kind, if she showed the barest hint of love, he might think she could be _understood._

If she was kind, she might change.

If she was kind, he might feel obligated to care for her.

But she is not, and he hates her — or hates her as much as a nine-year-old clinging to vestiges of innocence and hopefulness in a world of Fears can hate. (Gerry is not the kind of person to hate. Not yet. Maybe he never will be. But Mary Keay is so easy to despise, isn’t she?)

Mum is not nice or kind or gentle, and Gerry sits hunched in his window, runs his fingers across the faded ink of those four, insignificant, earth-shaking letters, and he decides that _he will be._

He’s not sure he knows what it means to be _gentle_ or _forbearing in spirit_ (he’s not sure he’s ever met anyone who has been kind to him before) but he’s going to _try._ Gerry takes a deep breath through the nose and feels something settle in his bones. Different. He’s going to be different.

* * *

Every journey begins with a single step, they say. But _saying_ is no help at all when you haven’t got the foggiest idea how to go about the doing. It’s all well and good for Gerry to read a word in a dictionary and think, _right, yes, I’m going to do_ that; it’s entirely another for him to figure out just _how_ to become something he’s not even sure he can be.

At first, he tries to think of what Mum would never do, and do that, but of course the thinking twists and morphs into that vicious beast of _over_ thinking, and leaves him with his cheek pressed against the sun-warmed glass of his window, brows knitted in a permanent furrow and not the slightest clue on what to do.

The so-called golden rule is a load of bull as well. Maybe treating others as you’d like to be treated works for _normal_ people, but Gerry’s not sure he could tell you how he _wants_ to be treated — if he even wants anything at all. He’s never been allowed to want anything, after all. Why start now?

It’s hard.

Of course it’s hard; it’s life after all, and life has never been easy or gentle or tender, not when it really counts. But to say “life is hard” as a dismissal is a disservice to all who struggle through the muck and mire of an existence on this weary, tiny planet. It’s one laugh short of a cop-out, one raised eyebrow past a comfort. It’s hard, life is hard, but nothing has ever come easily to Gerry, so he can’t even say it comes as a surprise, all the second-guessing and fumbling, the stuttering starts and stops of his frustrated attempts to be a good person. This is the hand life has dealt him, and he must play it regardless of the fact that he doesn’t know the rules, nor does he ever remember sitting down to play.

* * *

He is eleven and he has run away for the first time, has wandered the sticky heat of side streets in an English summer, unsure of what to do, where to go, who to _be._

He’s spent a whole day roaming the city streets, drifting through crowds and buildings and alleyways, moving like an aimless ghost through the shimmer and dance of heat off the pavements. It’s so odd to watch people crowding the streets, flooding through doorways and in and out of taxis. Everything seems so _normal_ for them, but to Gerry, this world of honking cars and bustling storefronts is completely alien.

As he walks, Gerry looks around at all of these people and wonders at how calm they are. They live in a world brimming with horrors and eldritch beings and books that can eat people and yet they can still smile and buy ice cream and hold hands with their significant others are they walk down the sidewalk.

These people frolic in the sunlight as though the darkness isn’t lurking within alleys and doorways, in shirtsleeves and pockets and handbags, huddling in a storm grate or beneath the sway of a skirt. They’re somehow happy and unafraid in a world so…so _rotten._

It’s baffling, and disorienting, and it makes something small and hopeful within Gerry shudder and wither and _die._

He doesn’t belong here, he realizes. Maybe he could have, once — but that time is long past. All these people live in a world that is messy and hateful, yes, but most of them are blind to the monsters that walk among them. Monsters that Gerry has met, has stood by and watched while his mother cuts deals and barters for books that have more blood than ink staining their pages.

This will never be home.

Thunder growls overhead, and he suddenly realizes how lost he is, how tiny in comparison to the crowds, all opening umbrellas or jostling to get off the streets before the summer storm hits. Gerry has absolutely no idea where he is.

Perhaps that ought to bother him more. Perhaps a lot of things ought to bother him more.

He keeps his head down as the rain begins to fall.

After a while, he finds himself climbing the steps to a church, stone steps rain-slicked beneath his feet and steeple stabbing at the weeping skies above. It’s quiet inside — even the squeaking echoes of his footsteps on the marble floor are hushed, somehow, fading out into the empty space.

He settles in a pew, the faint dappled hues of the stained-glass windows pooling around him, and stares up at the front of the room. It might be called a pulpit. Gerry can’t remember, and he isn’t sure it matters. Not to him, at least.

It’s silent until someone slides onto the other end of pew, and he jumps slightly at the movement in the corner of his eye. They’re slight and pale, with long messy hair and a tiredness that is more felt than seen. They sit hunched forward, cardigan sleeves bunched at their elbows as they stare up towards the intricate circular window at the head of the room. When they catch Gerry’s eye, they smile, and that’s tired as well.

“The rose window is beautiful, isn’t it?” they ask softly.

He nods mutely, both because it is and because something about this place makes him reluctant to disturb the quiet.

“I like it here,” the person says, a little to Gerry, but mostly to themself. “But I don’t come often. Not unless it’s empty. What about you?”

“I’ve never been here before,” he answers reluctantly. “I don’t go to church.”

They nod, and he can’t quite stop himself from continuing, though he couldn’t tell you why.

“I don’t believe in god.”

The person laughs gently, and it sounds like a sigh.

“That’s all right,” they say, and once again their eyes wander up to the magnificent rose window with its rainbow of colors. There’s a kind of elegance contained there that Gerry has never seen — something made up of a thousand separate broken pieces, pulled together into a beautiful whole.

“Sometimes I don’t think I do either.”

And that’s all right, too. Gerry doesn’t say it, he knows it’s not his place, but he offers the best smile he can muster, and receives a shaky, thankful one back.

They’re both silent, then, letting this thing that has passed between them expand into a quiet understanding.

He holds onto that quiet, that peace, long after he has found his stumbling way home, after tasting the bitterness that comes with Mum’s smug silence, because she _knew_ this would happen, she _knew_ Gerry would come back to her. It’s her fault, after all. She made him this way, she marked him for this world. There will always be an untraversable chasm just beyond his toes.

But sometimes, at least, there are those quiet moments that flit across to brush against his outstretched fingertips. Sometimes he’s not quite as alone as he feels.

* * *

He thought he was being kind, tracking down the Leitners. He tried to convince himself that it was a good thing to do, bringing the books to Mum, because at least that way they were in the hands of someone who could contain them, knew how to handle them, rather than scattered out in the world, hurting innocent people.

God, he’s been a fool. He can see it now, of course. See how he was just desperately craving some kind of attention, some kind of praise, of _love,_ from his mother. It was a pretty fucking stupid thing to hope for. Mum doesn’t love anything but her books, her Leitners (goddamned books, oh how he _hates_ them) and he _knows_ that. Gerry knows it to the core of his being. Knows it like the horizon knows the sun — intimately, and yet not at all.

But there was still a little voice singing in his veins, in the back of his mind as he chased the adrenaline and the books and the monsters they attracted. The danger, the exhilaration, the heady thrill of knowing _I just saved someone, I just made the world a better place._

He’s been hurting more people than saving, if he reckons right.

 _Not anymore,_ Gerry tells himself, shooing ants into his hand and depositing them outside, an instinct spent long in learning. _I won’t let her win anymore._

* * *

(The first time he burns a Leitner, he doesn’t feel exhilarated or victorious or even _happy._ He simply feels…tired. Tired, but assured. This is what he should be doing, sure as anything in this finite universe can be. It may not be the right thing, but it’s certainly close to it.

And that is what he repeats to himself like a mantra as he limps to bed later that night, nursing bruises and possibly cracked ribs from Mary’s rage. Maybe it wasn’t _good_ or _right_ or _perfect,_ but it was _better._

 _It was the better thing to do._ )

* * *

There is a cat beside him. There is a cat that sits on the stoop before Pinhole Books and peers up at him with big yellow-green eyes, and it feels a little like a miracle.

It’s not that Gerry has never seen a cat before, nothing like that. He has, but only from afar or in illustrations, shows, the like. He’s never had one bat at the hem of his jacket with wide eyes, never reached out tentative fingers to rub behind ears notched from past fights, never felt wonder at the rumbling purr in the head butting eagerly against his palm.

“Hello there,” he murmurs to the cat, and nearly startles at his own voice, hoarse from disuse. It’s been…days since he last spoke, maybe? He can’t recall. That saddens him, somehow, but it is only the faintest tendril of emotion coiling through the fog that swirls thick in his thoughts.

It’s a mangy thing, covered in scars and nicks, half an ear gone and one eye permanently half-lidded, but it purrs hard enough to nearly convince Gerry that his hand isn’t shaking of its own accord. When it meows loudly up at him, he nearly jumps out of his own skin. It’s been so long since anyone looked at him, really _looked_ at him, instead of glancing right over or through or purposefully turning away.

Something flickers in his chest, rattling at his ribcage until he lets loose a trembling breath it feels he’s been holding for a hundred years. It’s like cracking open a tomb door and letting out the stale, ancient air of death and ages past, pulling it back to allow sunlight and starlight and _life_ to creep back in.

Gerry clicks his tongue gently at the animal, and it meows louder, rubbing along his legs, leaving behind a ridiculous amount of fur.

“Wait here,” he tells it, and rises from his seat to fetch food from the flat above the book shop. His muscles and joints all creak in protest, and — distantly — Gerry wonders how long he has been sitting on that step, staring idly at nothing. (Wonders how long he’d have stayed there, if the cat hadn’t shaken him out of it.)

* * *

Life isn’t easy, nor is it kind, and especially not to Gerard Keay. He’s come to expect the worst, look for the catch in everything, the hidden strings lying in wait to tangle you up like a helpless moth to be eaten. He doesn’t trust much of anything, these days, especially not people. But he can’t quite bring himself to give up on kindness, can’t let go of those tiny scraps he’s received from people he’ll likely never see again. He hoards them like a magpie collecting anything that sparkles and shines, builds them up into a tiny nest in a corner of his heart and shelters them there.

Sometimes, when everything is too big and too sharp and too much, Gerry locks himself away with that little bundle of scraps and sifts through them, one by one, letting the meager glow of kindness wash over him.

There, a woman who bought him a coffee, unprompted. Here, a man who gave Gerry his umbrella on a stormy day, which he keeps rolled up and tucked neatly into his coat pocket still. A nurse who patched him up, someone who complimented his jacket, every concerned stranger who has ever stopped to ask him, truly, genuinely, _is he alright? Does he need help? Can they do anything?_

They are glittering moments of light in the blurry haze of fog and night that is his life, stars in a cold, dark universe.

Gerry wraps himself around their meager flame and wishes he had more.

(But oh, if he had more, wouldn’t they lose their meaning, their holiness against the backdrop of his disaster of a life? He thinks so. He will take what he is given.)

* * *

The cat was there when he came back with some tinned tuna that first evening, and it felt like a gift. Each and every time Gerry returns to Pinhole Books or steps outside to see the battered tabby waiting expectantly or dozing on the stoop, that tiny bubble of hope and calm in his chest grows a little larger, a little warmer, a little brighter.

He feeds it every night he’s there, and most of the time it reminds him to eat his own dinner. The cat helps push away the fog and the exhaustion and the quiet, burning anger at the very state of the world.

Gerry doesn’t believe in gods or angels or forces of good, but here is a creature so beaten and damaged by life that still purrs and curls in his lap and allows itself to be touched, and maybe that is the closest this world can get to a miracle.

* * *

When he sees the woman in Genoa, Gerry can tell immediately that she’s been marked. He sees it in the way she disappears from view in the corner of his eye, the way the edges of her being have gone blurry and soft. He sees it in the wisp of fog curling about her ankles, in the way no one even looks at her.

 _The Lonely,_ his mind supplies helpfully, feeling as distant as London and the bookshop and the ghost of his mother, rebuilding her strength within a book of skin and torment. _The Forsaken._

And oh, if he isn’t intimately familiar with that particular entity. It’s dogged his steps for years now, lying in wait, trying to snare him. But Gerry is nothing if not clever and careful, traits all but beaten into him by his mother.

He was trying to get away for a while. He was here to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Pinhole Books, of all of England while he waited for Mary to reform. For once, Gerry isn’t trying to hunt down a book to destroy or an entity to foil. He was just trying to _breathe,_ and it’s painfully ironic that no matter where he goes or what he does, the Entities and their victims follow him.

There really is no escape.

 _I could walk away,_ he thinks tiredly, staring at the hazy woman. _I could stand up from this table and find a different café, I could leave this be and let the Lonely get her like it got the rest. It’s not my problem._

And it’s true. Many things aren’t Gerry’s problem. But he’s seen far too much blame-shuffling, far too many people pointedly looking away from things that don’t affect them directly. The chant of _it’s not my problem_ is poison, both within Gerry’s world and without, and he’s not going to go back to drinking it. Not this time.

Gerry sighs, and stands. He knows what he has to say. He’s said it so many times before.

Maybe, just maybe, it will stick this time.

Maybe it won’t all be in vain.

* * *

(He spends too long in Genoa. By the time Gerry stumbles into Pinhole Books, feeling exhausted and frayed about his edges, Mary has already emerged from her damned skin book again, and she’s angry.

He knows this by the way the floor is strewn with shredded non-Leitner books, the furniture in his bedroom overturned.

He knows this by the way blood paints the walls, and a familiar mangy tabby tail hangs from fishing line in his doorway, dripping crimson wetly onto the threshold.

Sitting numbly on the tattered window seat, Gerry buries his head in his hands and _sobs._ )

* * *

Rationally, he knows Gertrude doesn’t care about him. Not really. She’s far more concerned with stopping the various rituals threatening all of reality — and rightfully so — and Gerry, having been used and used and _used_ his whole life, knows perfectly well he’s just another asset to her.

But that doesn’t stop him from enjoying her company. From trusting her from the very moment she offered to help rid him of the blight that was his mother’s presence in his life.

(It doesn’t stop the warmth that flickers in his chest every time someone mistakes him for Gertrude’s son, and she doesn’t bother to correct them.)

Gertrude Robinson is not his mother. She doesn’t care about him, not in that way, but then again, neither did Mary. At least now, they’re doing something to _help_ people.

(He should have known it would end badly.)

* * *

Death, Gerry has learned, is perhaps more of a kindness than many would first think. The End is far from benevolent, of course, but death is a release from the Fear-stalked circles of the world, a release which everyone receives eventually.

And in the end, his End, Gerry is terrified, but there is an undercurrent of relief there, in knowing that he can finally rest. Maybe he didn’t do enough, maybe he wasn’t kind enough, maybe he didn’t save as many people as he should have, but none of that matters now.

It’s over.

He can rest.

Gerard Keay breathes out his last, and it is a mingling sigh of relief and terror all in one.

But of course, it’s never that simple, is it?

Gertrude drags him back with a razor and a fountain pen, and everything _hurts._ He is dead, and not dead, awake and asleep, there and not there all at once, and it tears Gerry apart at seams he didn’t even know he _had._

( _Why couldn’t you just let me go? Haven’t I done enough for you?_ )

But the Eye doesn’t like to let knowledge die. And so Gerry is not dead. He doesn’t live on, but he continues.

And it hurts.

* * *

“And so Gerard Keay ended.”

He _feels_ the words more than hears them, and steels himself at the inevitable rush of pain that drags him into being, into awareness. It’s hard to register things as more than white noise and pain, and Gerry blinks hard at the man in front of him.

Small, slight. Hair an absolute mess, covered in scars. A look of the Eye about him, a shadow of the Watcher in those sharp eyes.

“You’re new,” he says mildly. He doesn’t feel much inclined to talk, but sue him, he’s _bored._ “Did you kill them?”

The answer is, most unfortunately, no.

But there’s something about this Jonathan Sims, this new Archivist, that intrigues him. And so Gerry keeps talking.

 _Tear my page out,_ he demands, and incredibly, Jon _does._

He feels Jon’s hands shaking slightly as he tears Gerry’s page from the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead — it _is_ still his skin, after all. His only physical form remaining. He can sense every touch against its surface ( _his_ surface?), including the rippling pain as it separates from the binding of the book, and the way the other man grips it as if to steady himself. He considers mentioning it, but in the end, he does not.

Gerry can barely register anything physically over the pain of Being, anyway.

(And it has been _oh_ so long since he was last handled so gently, touched like he has more value than a tool or an asset or a troublesome child or some damned encyclopedia of monsters, hasn’t it?)

He’s out of the book, and that’s what matters.

(He wants to believe that Jon will stay true to his word and destroy his page, someday, but trusting has never gotten Gerry anywhere but in this damned situation in the first place, now has it?)

But at least he’s slightly less likely to be used as a monster dictionary now.

And to be honest, Gerry _likes_ Jon.

In a kinder world, perhaps they could have been friends.

But the world is not kind, or gentle, or fair. What softness you find must be pulled from it with tooth and nail. The world does not manufacture kindness; you must make it yourself. It’s something you choose.

And just because you choose to be gentle does not mean the world will return the favor.

This does not stop Gerry from offering what little friendship he can to this fledgling Archivist. It does not stop him from smiling as he hears his preferred name from someone else’s lips.

* * *

The world does not readily offer kindness, not even to the gentlest of souls. It is rife with struggles and corruption, with cruelty and unfairness. It has never been kind with the hands it has dealt to Gerry Keay. His mother marked him, people mistrusted him, and Gertrude betrayed him to years of suffering.

But for once, just once, someone chooses the same path Gerry did so many years ago.

Jonathan Sims, stuttering and unsure, adrift in this world of monsters and fears, of nightmares sprung to life, chooses to follow through. He grits his teeth, draws in a breath, and sets fire to the page that has bound Gerry in painful Being for too many years. He offers the only bit of kindness that he can.

And so Gerard Keay ends.

**Author's Note:**

> Find my perpetually angsty ass on [tumblr](https://zannolin.tumblr.com/), [twitter](https://twitter.com/zannolin), and [instagram](https://www.instagram.com/zannolin/)! I'm currently manifesting the dsmp plot and crying over the block men 24/7.


End file.
